Mel-O-Toons: Treasure Island

I’m teaching ‘Treasure Island’ to my Year Eights at the moment, and they’re struggling to get to grips with the basic storyline, as we – unfortunately – don’t have time to read the whole book. So, last week I was looking for a quick summary on Youtube to show them and found this:

Well, I loved it thanks to the retro, Mid Century design. And my class seemed to like it too!

This version of ‘Treasure Island’ was part of a series of cartoons based on myths, folklore, legends and historical characters and some original stories by Thornton Burgess. They were produced in 1960 by a company called New World productions, using original children’s records as the soundtrack and setting the cartoons to the records. About 106 animations were produced in total. Many of them can be found on Youtube, and a partial episode list can be found here at Wikipedia, also where I found most of the information about the company.